Events - 19 May 17

This is a special moment when the community gathers together to talk about everything and anything (…in English of course!) and sips coffee and tea. Coffee House is free and open to all library members. Just drop in, no need to reserve! Coffee house is every Friday except during school holidays.

Come to a talk by Geetanjali Shree, a well-known Hindi novelist and short story writer, who will be talking about “Writing Women” in English.

Geetanjali Shree will share some thoughts about women looking at the world and about the world looking at women. Her writing (the novel Mai, as well as other fiction) and India will be the point of reference. Hopefully that will bring in various subjects, such as old and new, gender and class, East and West, indeed a whole array of contrasts that are too easily put in neat and opposing binaries. In fact, in the pluralistic, multi-lingual society that India is, these co-mingle. What emerges may look like chaos, a mere cacophony, but is, the author believes, creative polyphony. The stress would be on the need to move away from neat divides and linear trajectories.

The May read for the bookclub is “God’s Little Acre” by Erskine Caldwell.

Like “Tobacco Road,” this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens’ obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty’s son-in-law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike.First published in 1933, “God’s Little Acre” was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, and once led the all-time best-seller list, with more than ten million copies in print.